I was just chatting with a friend, and the topic of how wonderfully awesome Fruit Stripe gum is. I called it “Toys R Us” gum, because when I was growing up, my sisters and I for some reason associated it with the store. But he’d never heard that.
I googled it, and it appears I’m not the only one who’s made the connection. I’m mostly assuming that:
Perhaps it was mostly available (or exclusively available for a while) at the Toys “R” Us checkout lanes.
Yipes the Zebra resembled Gregory the Giraffe at the time? Or at least it was a colorful zoo animal.
Like toys, they’re the most enjoyable the first 5 minutes, then lose all flavor.
I never associated it with Toys R Us. Probably because the nearest one to my house was over 30 minutes away by car, and we couldn’t afford anything from there anyway.
I do remember the gum though. My sister used to go through 5 packs a week back in the old days.
Omigosh, I had a boyfriend in the '80s whose general expression of surprise was “yipes stripes!” With raised eyebrows and exaggerated double-take. Hadn’t thought of that in years.
Worst gum ever. Starts so good, then fades to nothing in seconds. Never associated it with Toys backwards-R Us, but guessed it must be the giraffe connection.
But that what makes it so awesome! It’s the crack of gum. The flavor would run out before your next breath, and while you inhaled, you’d pop the next colorfully striped stick into your mouth.
It tasted like magic for those few, fleeting, blissful moments. sigh
I grew up seeing Fruit Stripe at supermarkets and Woolworth. I don’t associate it with Toys R Us, but only because I had never seen a Toys R Us until sometime in my twenties. I recall Toys R Us commercials on TV in the 80s, but there wasn’t one within 100 miles of us, so I had never been.
Toys R Us used to havecolorful stripes on the outside of their buildings (and if I recall correctly, along the inside wall when you first walked in). Combine that with the zebra/giraffe thing, and I also have some sort of weird connection between TRU and FS gum.
Yeah, me too. I think I bought this gum at a five and dime chain called Mott’s (now gone). Mott’s had a lot of cheap candy. Some of it was in orderly packets on a shelf, but there was a lot of stuff that was in glass bins, and you just grabbed as many as you wanted. Most of this candy was, indeed, priced at a nickel or dime each. There were things like foil-wrapped chocolate footballs and the sort of cheap gum that came in little muslin drawstring pouches. We prized the pouches over the gum, in fact. But Mott’s had a wider variety of candy than most grocery stores back then, and it offered stuff like Blackjack and Clove gum.
I enjoyed making gum wrapper chains, and Stripes gum wrappers made particularly nice links for such chains.
When I was in middle school, I was in the habit of carrying half a dozen packs of gum in my purse, held together with a rubber band.
Weren’t they colored bright yellow and supposed to be gold nuggets? Then, of course, the 80s brought “Big League Chew”, which was gum in the form of one of the more disgusting yet socially acceptable in professional sports circles (at the time) habits, chewing tobacco. Kind of. What it actually was was just chunk gum (like Hubba Bubba or Bubble Yum) extruded into long, skinny shapes and stuffed into a foil pouch.
Speaking of Toys R Us, does any one else remember back in the 70s character apperances at the stores? Usually Geoffrey the giraffe and superheroes or other characters?
The TV spots had a pre-recorded jingle that went “Hey there kids it’s Geoffrey. When you come to ToysRUs you can meet me. Along GiGi and little baby G. And now guess who else you can see!”
Then a local voice over would announce the other characters, what store locations they’d be at, and what times.
